Microsoft Places

Microsoft Places is generally available and documented as a shipping product, with Microsoft Learn pages dated July and August 2026. Microsoft describes it as an AI-powered workplace app supporting flexible work, helping employees connect in person and helping organisations optimise space management through occupancy and utilisation insights. The defining architectural fact is that Places features are embedded directly in Microsoft Teams and Outlook rather than living in a separate application, which makes it the only product in this category where calendar-native booking is the default rather than an integration.

Licensing is the critical cost factor and it changed in 2026. Microsoft documents Places as having core, premium and AI-driven features, with access depending on licence. Core features, including work plans and workplace presence, are included with a wide range of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 plans: Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, E1, E3, E5, the Education A-series and frontline F1 and F3, plus several Teams plans. Places Explorer is documented as a premium feature.

For desk booking specifically, Microsoft is explicit. The Places desk documentation states that "Individual desk booking is a premium feature that requires desks to be backed by a space license", and adds that "For a limited time, users with a Teams Premium license can also book desks that are not backed by a space license". So the dependency is a space licence attached to the desk, with Teams Premium as a temporary alternative route. Booking a desk pool, which Exchange Online calls a workspace, and booking rooms do not carry that requirement. Users must also be enabled for Places Finder to book individual desks. Third-party summaries of Microsoft Message Center item MC1235124 report that Places licensing moved from per-user to space-based from April 2026, with the relevant licence being Microsoft Teams Shared Space, and cite a figure of around 8.55 per licence per month covering up to four desks plus one additional space; those figures come from third-party blogs, not Microsoft, and are not recorded as pricing here.

Operationally, Places is demanding to set up. Microsoft states that most Places features depend on a fully established hierarchy of buildings, floors, rooms, workspaces and desks, and desks follow a strict Building, Floor, Section, Desk hierarchy in the Places directory. Configuration is done through PowerShell cmdlets such as New-Place, Get-PlaceV3 and Set-PlaceV3, or the Places management portal, and administrators need an Exchange Online licence plus PowerShell 7.4.0 or later to run the cmdlets, since Windows PowerShell is not supported. Each desk gets a mailbox, created automatically if not supplied. Desks support four modes: Reservable, Drop-in, Assigned and Unavailable. Booking policies are applied with the Exchange Set-CalendarProcessing cmdlet. Peripheral devices can be linked to desks via Teams to enable automatic reservation, check-in and utilisation insights from monitor connections.

Microsoft Places is the obvious candidate for organisations already standardised on Microsoft 365 with mature Exchange Online administration. Because booking lives inside New Outlook and the Teams calendar on Windows and the web, and in the Places app in Classic Outlook, Outlook mobile and Teams mobile, adoption friction is lower than any third-party product can achieve. Core features such as work plans and workplace presence are already included in most E and Business plans, so a basic hybrid attendance capability may cost nothing incremental.

The decision turns on individual desk booking. If employees must pick a specific named desk, you need a space licence on every such desk, and that is a per-desk cost stacked on top of your existing Microsoft 365 spend. If desk pools are acceptable, meaning employees reserve within a neighbourhood and choose a seat on arrival, you avoid that licence entirely. Modelling this honestly, against per-user products such as deskbird or per-space products such as Skedda, is the single most valuable thing a buyer can do here, and the Teams Premium route is explicitly described by Microsoft as available only for a limited time, so it should not anchor a long-term business case.

It is a poor fit where administrative capacity is thin. Building the full Places hierarchy, creating desk mailboxes, applying calendar processing policies and maintaining it all through PowerShell 7.4 is real Exchange administration work, not a configuration wizard. Third-party products are considerably easier to stand up.

It is also not a space management product. There is no evidence of block and stack planning, space chargeback, BOMA area reporting or move management. Organisations with portfolio problems should pair Places with a space tool or choose an IWMS instead. Visitor management and wayfinding were likewise not found in the documentation read.